Are Hovercraft Safe?
In another case of trying to answer potential questions about the use of hovercraft for commuter traffic in the Potomac region this article had hoped to look into the safety and accident history of hovercraft.
Doing a search in Google yielded no results. Assuming that the search phrases used were inaccurate, both CNN and the BBC were searched.
Both sites did have results for accidents involving hovercraft. With the exception of one person who fell off the side of a hovercraft on the BBC site all the rest of the results were hovercraft being used to rescue people involved in some other sort of accident.
This lack of findable news stories on a craft that has been used so extensively for 50 years is simply amazing.
A similar search for ferry accidents has 31 pages of results on the BBC site alone. It was clear that most of these were actual ferry accidents and not the craft being used for rescues.
The contrast is sharp.
This leaves a very important question: are hovercraft the safest means of transportation ever invented?
If not, they are certainly one of the safest.
With hovercraft companies advertising tens of millions of miles and tens of thousands of annual trips made with their individual hovercraft it is almost unbelievable that no one has even had one parked on their foot at some point.
Odds are though it is the very nature of the machine that makes them so safe. Hovercraft are large with wide bodies that are surrounded with basically a big rubber bumper and do not actually ride on the surface of the Earth. While they do technically fly they do so mere feet above the surface so engine failure would not involve a horrific crash to the ground. Hovercraft are also fairly basic technology as well which can only increase the level of safety and reliability.
Another factor probably is that the companies that operate hovercraft work very hard at keeping their standards of maintenance and operations very high.
What ever is responsible for their extremely impressive safety record, there is no doubt that hovercraft are beyond safe.
March 27th, 2008 at 10:14 am
You are correct in stating that very few hovercraft accidents have been recorded. We know that a spectator was run over in India earlier this year ironically by a rescue hovercraft, and we know that one older man perished from hypothermia in the USA, after his home-made hovercraft sank in icy waters after a fishing trip. Lack of statistical information is often perplexing to insurers, who look for risk assessment data. Potentially, hovercraft can drift from side to side, but our personal leisure hovercraft have less pressure than a seagull standing on one leg – we demonstrate this by flying over a plate of eggs without cracking any. Some poorly designed hovercraft are very thin, as they are weight dependent vehicles, but our product the Hov Pod has been designed for marine leisure use, so is built with safety in mind. See http://www.hovpod.com